


Walk Right Beside Me

by eosaurora13



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Crowley needs a hug, Crowley-centric (Good Omens), Idiots in Love, M/M, Stargazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-16 19:40:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19324777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eosaurora13/pseuds/eosaurora13
Summary: Crowley realizes the answer to the most painful question he ever asked: Why did I fall?





	Walk Right Beside Me

* * *

A child begins with one single step

Then walks a million miles

And though these wings are not ready yet

I will try to fly. 

Questions are not, at their most basic nature, bad. Questions are how every child learns about the world around them and how to interact with it. They can, if used judiciously, reveal the meaning behind everything. It can be assumed that angels, provided they have enough _imagination_ , would do the same. And, if we follow that line of thinking, that angels started out as something like children (though we can’t call them children per se – angels are something else entirely separate), then we could logically assume questions were encouraged.

If he was the angel of anything, the running joke around Heaven was that he was the angel of questions. It wasn’t that he disobeyed – when the Almighty said to make this star or that nebula, he would. He just wanted to know why – he wanted to know the purpose of each and every thing that he set to motion in the heavens. 

At first, the questions weren’t too deep or too troubling. _Why should this star burn blue instead of red? Why should that nebula look like_ this _instead of_ that?

His tasks took him from one end of the universe to the other. He couldn’t begin to recount all of the wonderous sights he’d seen or created, nor did he really have anyone to recount them to.

But he couldn’t let anything go, not even when his superiors said he should, begged him to keep his head down and do as he was told. 

When the notion of humans first came around, it threw him. Animals, he understood – at least he thought he did. Humans were meant to be different, according to his superiors. That was God’s plan.

So he asked questions. _What made them different? What made them special?_ Why _should they be special?_

That must have been enough to anger Her, though he never felt Her wrath firsthand. No, he was too lowly for that. The verdict was handed to him by another angel, low like him, but with the smug satisfaction that she hadn’t done wrong.

He would forever remember that horrible angel’s smile as she _pushed_ , and he fell.

His memory of falling was the only one to fade with time, the years dulling the utter agony of not only falling millions of lightyears into Hell but being disconnected from all that he’d known and held dear.

There was never a reason given, no answer to that most burning question of why. 

_Why did I fall?_

* * *

If you take small stones, one at a time, 

You will move that whole mountain. 

If you climb each rainbow, 

It's gold that you'll find

And shelter from the rain. 

What no one mentioned – probably because, before the first Rebellion, it didn’t yet exist – about Hell was how lonely it was, not just for the souls condemned to its depths but for the demons that patrolled its halls. With his charred wings and snake’s eyes, he certainly fit the description of a demon now. He wasn’t quite right for Heaven – he understood that to some extent – Hell was much, much worse. In Hell, there were no questions – certainly no answers. He hated it that much more.

“Get up there and make some trouble,” they said, after God fulfilled Her promise of Creation. As if there was much trouble to be had in a finite Garden with only two inhabitants.

He would never be sure if he’d actually caused trouble (read: done evil) by persuading Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. The Almighty had put it in the Garden, which, since he could no longer ask questions, he took it to mean the humans could do something with it. It was all too easy to whisper in Eve’s ear and set everything in motion. It wasn’t stars, but it was something.

What he knew, though he might not have known it at the time, was how unique the angel guarding the eastern gate was. Anybody who’d spent any time around the Garden knew that angel had a flaming sword – his superiors had certainly mentioned it with caution, yet when he slithered up beside him (to do what, he honestly couldn’t say), the sword was conspicuously absent. 

In the end, it wasn’t their conversation that stayed with him (though it did heal just a tiny bit of the ache left behind where his heart had been – really, giving the sword away? It was almost un-angelic) but the almost instinctual way the angel raised his wing as the first raindrops fell to offer him shelter.

That was…unexpected. 

They parted on – well, not necessarily friendly terms – but they parted cordially enough. Long after, he still found himself smiling for the first time in a long time.

Maybe there was something to being on Earth that might or might not have anything to do with the angel who, more often than not, was also stationed there.

* * *

My ears can't hear, 

My heart can't feel, 

I need strength when I'm weak, 

I need your faith in me. 

A long bus ride at the ungodly hour just before dawn is not often what two people need to settle back into themselves. However, it can be safely assumed that an angel and a demon are not your ordinary people and that, perhaps, after facing down Armageddon, such a thing is exactly what they need. 

The bus slowed to a stop as Crowley waved it down, its brakes squealing too much to be perfectly safe, but it would be safe enough to take him and Aziraphale back to London – he could ensure that much. Besides, he had no intention of being on this particular bus again. 

Crowley slid into one of the vacant seats. Though, to be fair, for a bus in Tadfield in the middle of the night, it wasn’t like many seats were going to be filled. He half expected Aziraphale to sit one row forward (or one row back – the logistics didn’t matter – there was room either way) as he usually did – something about plausible deniability in case Heaven caught wind of their Arrangement. He’d always thought it a bit foolish but, after the first time bringing it up and having to suffer Aziraphale’s ridiculous pouting, he let it slide.

Yet he couldn’t deny, here on the first night after the not-end of the world, that he wanted one more thing to shift. Just ever so slightly. Was that too much to ask?

Then Aziraphale sat down next to him. As if they’d been doing it all along. As if it wasn’t the very thing Crowley’s wretched heart had been crying out for.

Crowley gaped at him, trying to get his mouth to make any manner of cohesive sound. He settled for abject staring, thankful his glasses hid his eyes somewhat.

Aziraphale gave him a tired smile. 

It hit Crowley like a sack of bricks between the eyes, how Aziraphale’s world view had been utterly upended over the past twenty-four hours and how lost he must be without that assurance. Aziraphale’s vehement denial that they were on their own side the previous day had faded so fast, it made Crowley’s head spin. He had thought up comebacks this time should Aziraphale protest when he told him neither of them had a side (except for each other), but no protests were forthcoming. Crowley assumed his discussion with the Almighty (or with Metatron, more likely) hadn’t gone well – there hadn’t been time to catch up since their last fateful argument. Stuff had happened.

Stuff that Crowley really didn’t care to remember.

The bus door closed, a horrible squeaking that was less pleasant than fingernails down a chalkboard, and the bus slowly trundled to life. A bump in the road knocked their shoulders together – nothing painful, or even uncomfortable – and Crowley let that be his excuse to hold that point of contact. Something for his angel to lean on. 

Aziraphale said nothing – or if he did, it was lost beneath the bus’s rumble – but some of his tension bled away. He relaxed against the touch with the softest sigh. 

Crowley gazed out the window, not focusing on anything in particular as the dark, nondescript masses and flashes of light sped by. If he looked closely, he could see the faintest hint of daylight creeping over the horizon, but his whole world revolved around Aziraphale leaning into him. 

A soft tap on his shoulder. “My dear, I do believe we’ve reached your stop.”

Crowley slowly turned away from the window. Aziraphale was already standing and Crowley intimately felt the loss of the contact. He glanced up, hoping to read something in Aziraphale’s expression, but Aziraphale had ducked his head. His only tell was his fiddling with the hem of his coat. 

Crowley bit back a frustrated groan. _Oh, to Heaven with this._ He didn’t wait to see if Aziraphale stayed on the bus or if he followed him into the flat. He wasn’t meant for this, for always staying a step ahead. It was too lonely a road to walk, and he had harbored such hope, after realizing Aziraphale was not, in fact, dead, that he wouldn’t have to walk alone again. 

“Well, it is a tad Spartan, isn’t it?”

Crowley’s heart ceased beating, his breath catching in his chest. He turned and there was Aziraphale, all in light – an utter contrast to how dark he kept his flat, taking it all in. No part of his body worked; no part of his brain could process having Aziraphale here. “Wha-?”

Despite how small he looked, how he drew his shoulders in, Aziraphale managed to radiate disapproval with a slight raise of his eyebrows. “You did invite me to stay with you, if I recall correctly.”

Crowley could replay that conversation with perfect clarity, knew Aziraphale could too. He could not, however, restart the sudden static that his brain had become. “I thought I’d gone too fast again.” Those words had destroyed him, and now he was breaking in all the same places.

Aziraphale’s eyes snapped to his. “No, that – I would – I’d like to stay. If that’s alright?”

Crowley couldn’t hide his smile, a small and tender thing.

* * *

It was hard to know what to do, or how to act, now that he no longer had Heaven or Hell breathing down his neck. No more paperwork, for starters. No more demonic interruptions in his television watching, especially when he was in the mood for Golden Girls – often for hours on end. No more clandestine meetings with Aziraphale – the Arrangement, such as it was, was well and truly void. They could meet freely, wherever the mood struck them (they had built up quite a list of places to see over six thousand years and, with the prospect of at least some of that ahead of them, they had every intention of marking some off).

In all that time, Crowley had never discovered Aziraphale’s love of stars. Sure, the angel loved his food, his books, that ridiculous armchair in the back of his shop – but stars? That was new. To Crowley, at least. 

They had stopped at the Hayden Planetarium on their visit to New York – because, as Aziraphale told it, he wanted to try the local cuisine. Crowley had wanted to tell him most of it wasn’t that great – he had visited the city more times than he cared to admit, but Aziraphale insisted. How they ended up dodging families with bickering siblings and those quite large school outings with the required handfuls of students paying no attention whatsoever (and, if their phones miraculously stopped working as Aziraphale went by, well), Crowley had no idea.

His unmitigated hatred of large crowds was utterly surmounted when Aziraphale stared at the ceiling in wonder during one of the shows, his face glowing in the soft light reflecting from the projected images. 

Crowley had to remind himself to breathe as Aziraphale turned that wonder to him with literal stars in his eyes. He swallowed back the renewed invitation to run away to Alpha Centauri, settled instead for leaving New York – not fast enough in his mind – and taking Aziraphale to one of the most remote places on Earth, a place that humans had no name for.

They laid out on a blanket and stared up at the stars, their shoulders just touching as they had on the bus. Sometimes, Crowley would point out a star or constellation; other times, Aziraphale would. Other times they would simply lay there, enjoying the moment.

“Imagine how awful it would have been if Adam hadn’t stopped Armageddon,” Aziraphale murmured, breaking the silence.

Crowley resolutely kept his gaze on the sky. He’d laid his glasses somewhere off to the side (his excuse was that he could see the stars better – the truth was a bit more complicated). “What are you on about?”

Aziraphale waved a hand at the heavens. “Well, there would be no one left to enjoy all of this.” Crowley couldn’t see his smile, but he heard it in his voice. “It would have been a shame, really. They’re quite beautiful.”

Tears stung his eyes, his hands clenching at the memory of molding the fabric of reality to bring those stars into being. Aziraphale gently laying a hand over his and squeezing just enough to stop its motion startled Crowley almost out of his skin, his eye snapping sideways out of instinct. There was no getting his mouth to work – his brain was still trying to catch up. “You – you – how did you – ?”

Aziraphale’s smile was something else, different but still so similar – so _Aziraphale_ , confident – _knowing_. 

The rush of emotion flooding his veins could only be described as fond. “You’re a right bastard sometimes,” he muttered.

“So you’ve said,” Aziraphale said, with a chuckle. He sat up, took one last look at the stars. “I think it’s time to head in. I’d hate for you to catch cold.”

Crowley could have protested, almost did, but at the mention of the cold, chill bumps crept down his spine. Besides, far be it for him to argue with his angel.

Aziraphale took his time getting to his feet, reached down to help Crowley up.

Crowley blinked slowly, processing, and grasped the offered hand.

As they stood, only inches apart, with Aziraphale still holding his hand between his own and nothing – no pretense, no lies, no obligations – to stop them, Crowley felt the world shift, as if something had been waiting to finally be set into motion. He reached up with his free hand, tracing along Aziraphale’s cheekbone, down his neck, the softest caress.

Aziraphale shuddered. “Crowley…” He pressed into Crowley’s hand, his eyes falling shut.

“Back to London, then?” Crowley would refuse to admit how wrecked he sounded if anyone questioned him about it.

Aziraphale nodded.

Upon their return, they walked into the bookshop side by side, the times of Aziraphale staying too far ahead or too far behind because he feared Heaven demanded it long behind them. Despite the shop’s comforting warmth, Crowley shivered as Aziraphale helped him out of his coat and hung it on the coatrack beside the door. 

It had taken them six thousand years and the world almost ending to realize what they had, what they’d always had. Crowley wasn’t an idiot (no matter what circumstances might imply). There was the distinct possibility this was all a part of the Ineffable Plan, though he had a few words to say if that were the case. 

But as Aziraphale – his angel, who was miraculously alive and breathing – coughed, drawing him from his musings, he thought that maybe he was simply finally acknowledging he was right where he was supposed to be, and had been. All along.

* * *

Don't walk in front of me; 

I was not born to follow. 

Don't walk behind me; 

We were all born to lead. 

Don't walk without me; 

I might need you tomorrow. 

Walk right beside me, 

Be the real friend I need. 

**Author's Note:**

> This is my second fic for these idiots - I adore them so much. I hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed writing it!
> 
> Title and lyrics are from the Celtic Woman song "Walk Beside Me".


End file.
